A Letter to Mr. Arturo Perez-Reverte

Dear Mr. Perez Reverte,
First an introduction. I am a reader from the Philippines who enjoys your work and the worlds you create and convey. I am also an aspiring writer and like yourself (but to a much less notable degree), share a background in journalism.

With a knowledge of your career before fiction, some understanding of the journalistic mind and curiosity about the creative process, it was with immense interest that I read your novel, The Painter of Battles, and with some hesitation but great anticipation that I write you to pick your brain now.

In particular I am interested in your views on the act (or non-act?) of observing. In your novel, Faulques is a photographer who becomes a painter with an obsession to neatly define the nature of war or the rules of chaos. In reality, you are a war correspondent who has become a writer who in this novel depicts the nature of war and its effect on participants and observers (I apologise for my simplistic breakdown).

That you end the book with Markovic abandoning his initial goal of killing Faulques by implying that the latter is already dead inside suggests the dehumanisation of the observer. Is this the inevitable end for artists trying to make sense of the horrors of war through the instruments of their craft? Or is it a warning against obsession? If as Markovic says, "photographing people is the same as raping them", can any observer of war emerge innocent?

From behind the photographer' s camera, the painter's brushes, the journalist's recorder and the writer's pen; the observer's eye is passive but not unaffected. To be completely unaffected I think would be complete dehumanisation without even going through the process. However, in addition to dealing with the experience of war or seeing a war as a human being, the peculiar species that is the artist must also go through the creative struggle to process and express what s/he has seen – an experience that is no less tumultuous or dangerous, I think.

As a journalist who has lived conflicts, did you feel that traditional reportage was inadequate to accurately convey the story of lives lost and man's brutality unleashed ("The sound of a bullet as it bursts a skull. The laugh of a man who has just won seven cigarettes by betting on whether the foetus of a woman he just disembowelled with his bayonet is male or female.")? And how does the inability to do so feed the guilt and impotence of the observer? Does the writing of fiction somehow fill in those spaces of helplessness? Or is the presentation of the representation the safest vantage point from which to pursue the project?

If painting is the artistic cousin of photography and fiction of journalism, do you feel that journalism has too limited a palette to capture the essence of war? Or are all palettes limited to achieve that sublime?

I thank you for your time in reading this letter.

Sincerely,
Friena P. Guerrero